People vs Machines

“Why pay anything at all for translation? Google offers translation for free!”

If all you are worried about is price, there are plenty of automatic translators on the internet. Machine Translation (MT) engines will render a text into a target language of your choice, sufficiently clearly and accurately for you to be able to grasp the gist of what the original says.

This is a perfect tool to help you read an email in a language you are not familiar with, for example, or to grasp the basic message of a report. But when it comes to a translation which is intended, in whichever way, to represent you and your business, MT is totally inadequate, and could well hurt your business in a variety of ways.

The QuickSilver blog team have carried out a number of translation experiments to highlight the limitations of MT. If these limitations were to impact on your business in any way – a mistranslated catalogue, a financial report full of errors or an ambiguously worded technical manual – the consequences could far-reaching and unpleasant.